Christie's Exceptional Sale made £11.8 million on King Street, led by an Old Kingdom Egyptian pair statue and a first edition of Wuthering Heights.
Christie’s opened the evening of Tuesday 30 June 2026 at Christie’s King Street in St James’s with The Exceptional Sale: Masterworks Across Cultures, which made £11,777,040. The Old Masters Evening Sale followed two hours later.
The sale ranged across a Roman marble funerary relief, Flemish tapestries, silver, automata, a Fabergé rabbit and a Tompion bracket clock of about 1692. Thomas Williams, who heads the sale, called them trophy pieces of cultural, historical and scientific significance. He said 38 per cent of the new registrants were millennials.
An Egyptian limestone pair statue of the royal acquaintances Nebefwy and Mes-sat led at £3,710,000. It dates from the Old Kingdom, about 2400 to 2300 BC, and came from the Hovingham Hall Collection.
A first edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, bound with Anne’s Agnes Grey in the original 1847 publisher’s cloth, sold for £1,206,500. It set a record for the author and the highest price for any printed book by a woman.
Houdon’s bust of Voltaire of 1778 made £698,500. Four Winston Churchill boxes made £584,200 together, led by a cigar humidor, a gift from Franklin D. Roosevelt, that sold for £330,200 after five minutes of bidding.